Extending Design Thinking, Content Strategy, and Artificial Intelligence into Technical Communication and User Experience Design Programs: Further Pedagogical Implications

This article follows up on the conversation about new streams of approaches in technical communication and user experience (UX) design, i.e., design thinking, content strategy, and artificial intelligence (AI), which afford implications for professional practice. By extending such implications to technical communication pedagogy, we aim to demonstrate the importance of paying attention to these streams in our programmatic development and provide strategies for doing so.

Online and Blended Teaching Readiness Assessment (OBTRA)

The rapid shift to online teaching and learning in postsecondary education during COVID-19 forced institutions to provide additional support and resources to instructors, especially those who were teaching online for the first time. The Online and Blended Teaching Readiness Assessment (OBTRA) was designed to assess the perceptions and competencies of instructors undertaking the move to online teaching to identify strengths and limitations. The present study identified the underlying factor structure and evidence of construct validity of the OBTRA for a sample of 223 postsecondary instructors (data collected from November 2019 to January 2020). An exploratory factor analysis revealed 5 factors that were interpreted as Technology, Engagement and Communication, Pedagogy, Perceptions of Teaching Online, and Organization. OBTRA scores were also found to be positively correlated with scores obtained from measures of instructional practices and teacher efficacy. The next steps in the development of the OBTRA are to examine how it can be used to enable academic units to provide the most appropriate support and resources aligned with instructor needs and to guide instructors to the initial steps required for successful transition to online teaching.

Teaching Global Communication During COVID-19: Challenges, Mitigation, and Lessons Learned

Higher education institutions in the United States resorted to remote instruction after the disruption caused by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The disjointed nature of this transition of managing the academic crisis needs to be critically engaged. By examining the experiences of global communication faculty at a midsize Midwestern university, this study attempts to reflect on the circumstances, challenges, and some unexpected outcomes of the phenomenon. Based on testimonies generated from the authors’ experiences and interviews conducted with instructors, the study outlines lessons learned from the adoption of media technology and offers insights on reimagining global communication pedagogy in the post-pandemic period.

Employment, Employability, and Competencies of the Bachelor of Secondary Education Graduates

Tracing graduates has become an imperative for higher education institutions much more during the pandemic. This tracer determined the employment and employability status of the 2019 BSE graduates and identified the competencies they adequately acquired and deemed vital for work. It used descriptive design, and data were collected from the 103 graduates through a Google form with open and closed-ended questions administered between November and December 2020. Results revealed that most of the graduates had been employed in teaching and teaching-related jobs but mostly in contractual arrangements within the first and second six months after graduation. Many had their first jobs with meager salaries from the private sector. Communication, pedagogy, information communication technology, time management, and flexibility were the top competencies they adequately acquired and were beneficial in work. The study concluded that these graduates had acquired 21st-century skills in their respective degree programs. These results have corresponding implications for future research in confirming the most employable skills in secondary teaching. As recommended, classroom instruction might emphasize the development of these skills. Eventually, these become the competitive advantage and employability capitals of future graduates. Administering the licensure examination and the release of its results can be done within the first three months after graduation to lessen the cost of waiting.

Queer Communication Pedagogy

The emerging subfield of queer communication pedagogy (QCP) marks an educative praxis that centers the liberation of queer and trans subjects and, specifically, those who are most violently impacted by racist cisheterosexism in the form of carceral logics and policing. Intersectional articulations of sex, gender, and sexual difference are disciplined and literally policed both in and out of the communication classroom. Course design, for instance, provides a disciplinary means for justifying the violent repression of sex, gender, and sexual difference in the classroom through activities that insist on a compulsory framing of gender in binary terms. Or, policing can emerge in the racist cisheterosexist pedagogue’s gaze that communicatively constitutes “incivility” out of racialized sex, gender, and sexual difference; this is evidenced in the violent policing of queer and trans students of color beginning with the school-to-prison pipeline and on into higher education settings where educators are empowered to call on campus police forces to remedy what they perceive as “unruly”—queer—students. QCP reflects histories comprising both critical communication pedagogy (CCP) and queer pedagogy. CCP, itself informed by critical pedagogy, is committed to liberatory educative ends driven by praxiological means derived of lived experience in historical context. That is, critical pedagogy takes as a point of departure lived experience as a means of resisting intersectional oppression and, in turn, enacting progressive social change. CCP strives toward these liberatory goals through communicative means, specifically dialogic encounters between/with/as students-and/as-teachers. Conversely, queer pedagogy refers to a destabilization of pedagogical presumption implicating the racist cisheteronormative foundation informing carceral-centered knowledge production and educative engagement. In turn, queer pedagogy labors toward the abolition of carcerality including the prison industrial complex and police state. Taken together, QCP marks an activist-oriented educative praxis that labors toward liberation of queer and trans subjects through the abolition of racist cisheterosexist carcerality.